The heat-vision cameras heading for Cornwall’s RNLI lifeboats

Somewhere on the Thames, a crew filled a rescue dummy with hot water bottles and threw it in the river. Then they went looking for it in the dark.

It was a test, and the thing being tested is on its way to lifeboats around the Cornish coast.

The RNLI has signed a five-year deal with Teledyne that puts thermal imaging cameras on its lifeboats, alongside a full digital navigation refit. The cameras read body heat rather than light, so a casualty in black water shows up as a bright shape on a screen when there is nothing to see with the naked eye.

What the crews will actually be looking at

The thermal camera is one part of a bigger package. Lifeboats are getting Raymarine electronic chart systems built on Axiom chartplotters, Quantum or Cyclone Pro radar, and YachtSense ship control, with the Teledyne FLIR Marine camera feeding into the same digital display the crew are already using to navigate.

That last detail matters more than it sounds. A searchlight forces a crew to sweep a beam across the water and hope someone is looking in the right direction at the right second. A thermal feed on the main screen means the heat signature is simply there, in front of whoever is driving the boat.

Ross Barraclough, the RNLI’s Chief Engineer and Technical Director, said the system would give crews “improved situational awareness, a simplified method of operation and a digital platform that can adapt as new technologies emerge”.

📷Credit: RNLI

The dummy, and the hot water bottles

The trial ran at Chiswick RNLI, one of four stations on the River Thames. Because a training dummy is exactly as warm as the water it is floating in, the crew needed to give the camera something to find. Hot water bottles did the job.

The footage that came back makes the case on its own. A pale shape drifts on grey water, a red-orange bloom where the head and lifejacket sit, and it stays visible as the boat closes in. At the end of the clip a crew member in full kit lights up on the same screen, arm out, pointing at the casualty.

What it means for Cornwall

The work is spread over five years, and the RNLI has named the classes it starts with rather than the stations. Three are in that first phase: the Shannon all-weather lifeboat, the Atlantic 85 inshore lifeboat, and the E class boats that work the Thames. The rest of the fleet follows.

Shannons and Atlantic 85s are both boats you will find in Cornish boathouses, alongside the other all-weather classes and the D class inflatables that make up the rest of the county’s cover. No running order has been published, though, so there is nothing yet to say which station is fitted when.

What is not in question is how much of the work here happens in the dark. The lifeboat stations around Cornwall cover a coast of unlit cliffs, rip currents and long stretches with no reference points at all, and a good share of the shouts come in long after the light has gone. A camera that does not care whether the sun is up is worth rather more on that coast than it is on a well-lit stretch of river.

Go and look at it yourself in September

The kit will be on show at the Southampton International Boat Show, which runs from 18 to 27 September and has the RNLI as its Charity of the Year for 2026. There is a Shannon moored in the show marina, a new Atlantic 85 Mk4 fitted with the latest navigation gear, and the charity’s engineers on hand at stand H38.

Tickets are £20 with the RNLI’s discount code RNLISIBS26, which the charity says is close to 40% off, with the option to add a donation at checkout.

Grégoire Outters, President of Teledyne Marine Group, said the company’s technology “is designed to perform in the most demanding marine environments”.

The five-year timetable means some crews will be waiting a while. Nobody has yet said which boat gets the first camera.

📷Credit: RNLI